Coal Bucket, Candy Bucket

Dressed in a two-pieced wool suit with perfectly manicured, unpolished nails, the teacher put a right-handed old glove on and opened the door to the round-bellied coal stove in the center of the first-grade classroom. The open door to the stove threw out light from low-burning flames across the room as the students, all 35 first-graders, practiced their numbers and letters.

She reached down in the coal bucket, picked up two or three blocks of coal, and tossed them to the back of the stove. Then she picked up the poker to “poke up a fire” to allow oxygen to gather inside the blocks and combust and give off heat. After two or three hard pokes inside the stove, the flames lit up in blues and reds.

The teacher closed the door to the stove and set the black-tipped poker down beside the coal bucket. She pulled off the glove and hung it across the coal bucket handle to await the next fueling of the fire in her classroom at McKee Elementary School in Jackson County.

There was another coal bucket, a new one in the classroom, but it never stored coal. It stored candy money collected early in the homeroom before classes began, just after the morning announcements and the pledge. The bucket was filled with nickels, dimes, quarters, and a list of the candy bars alongside the name of each child who had paid for the afternoon recess candy treat.

The price of the candy: one nickel per candy bar in 1954. Students who chose not to buy candy were allowed to bring their own afternoon recess snacks. Two students were chosen by the teacher to carry the candy bucket from the classroom to the principal’s office in a building on top of the hill where the candy was purchased and the order was filled.

The students, each with one hand on the candy bucket, returned to the classroom. The coal bucket of candy sat by the teacher’s desk until afternoon break, when the candy and sometimes change were dispensed to whoever purchased each bar.

I am one of the students who carried the candy bucket often and learned to carry the buckets of life with confidence because of Mrs. Aileen Boggs and her model of teaching with a candy bucket and a coal bucket.